A man told me once that you could get by well in life if you would talk 20 percent of the time and listen 80 percent of the time. Those who know me can attest to the fact that I am the poster-child violator of this advice.

What makes it worse is that I’ve been real lucky with friends throughout most of my life. I now pal around with some of the brightest, most well-educated, and competent people you might ever want to know, recognized experts in their fields. There even some PhDs in there, believe it or not.

So, what do I do when we have lunch, or share a libation? I run my damn yap. Can’t help it.

When I visit with my friend who’s a high-ranking Army officer, you’d think I wrote a bunch of field manuals or something.

When I’m with my contractor friend, I can build anything.

To a professor who teaches public administration, well, hell, I’m Max Weber’s third cousin.

I have my journalism friend convinced, or at least he’s polite enough to spare me rebukes, that I’m the best thing since H.L. Mencken passed. (Partially in my defense, at least I don’t say, “It’s a secret between you and I,” and I haven’t used the word “awesome” in a sentence since Barbara Jane Stubblefield quit wearing those bullet bras back in high school).

I even tried “experting” with my wife. That didn’t work out too well, so I quit.

With all that having been said and done, in the world of BS artistry, there’s only one person on earth who can hold a candle to these folks who offer advice on social media. It seems like, these days, that the basic threshold that must be passed to join the wonderful world of punditry and prediction is to know absolutely nothing about a topic other than how to find a nutcase website that can provide catchy sound-bites.

Simplify? Lord, but these folks can simplify. A nuclear war with a country full of psychopaths? No big deal. We’ll just bomb them in their strategic places.

A two-front war? As the Facebook pundit would say, “We pulled it off in World War Eleven, didn’t we?”

Financial solvency through spending more on less? As the Enron boys used to say, “The only reason it’s never worked is because we weren’t the ones doing it.”

Obviously, I’m an expert on such things and I could go on and on. Must go, though. Gonna contact my good friend for a lunch date, the one who can play a guitar like ringing a bell. Must be prepared to lecture him about Eddie Lang’s influence on Les Paul. It might enlighten him and me.

Just thinkin'

Thoughts: Darwin and Stuff

As most readers know, I shamelessly paraphrase the late Lewis Thomas. He, however, reflected late at night while listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. I reflect during the quiet times of the morning listening to whatever the YouTube sprites might suggest. This morning they slipped in a collection of Maria Grinberg’s rendition of the Beethoven sonatas. Have mercy!

It did remind me of a Thomas quote I read somewhere about the majesty of the earth’s life moving from blue algae to the B-minor Mass in only five billion years.

Then my friend Michael Hester posted “25 Life Lessons from Albert Einstein.” All were good, but the last one hugged my neck like a long-lost friend: “Never lose a holy curiosity.”

It reminded me that I heard a speaker say once that if you studied a topic for 30 minutes a day, in five years you would be an expert. That led me to a long crusade to learn about Charles Darwin’s writings on descent with modification, commonly referred to as “evolution," or, by some fundamentalists as "oozings from the pits of hell," It had seemed the most logical thing I had ever heard of when I encountered it in high school but I had not taken the time to learn, really learn, about it.

So, with the help of “Books on Tape,” a career involving a lot of travel, and Little Rock Public Library, I started. I began with Stephen Jay Gould’s “Ever Since Darwin,” proceeded to a life of Thomas Huxley (Darwin’s “Bulldog”), and then to the works of Darwin himself. Hardly an expert, I do find myself able to converse freely on the topic.

I worked myself through the feuding between Gould and Richard Dawkins over whether the process of modification occurred at the organism or genetic level, an argument that ended with Gould’s untimely death and the advances in genetics that seem to have proven Dawkins right. Imagine the thrill of attending a presentation by Richard Dawkins himself in what will probably be his only trip ever to Little Rock.

It has been a joyous journey. I still marvel at the mind of this self-taught man Darwin (science as such was taught in universities as a field of study until after Huxley’s campaign for it in the late 1800s). Since its publication in 1859, there hasn’t been a scientific study or breakthrough that was not consistent in all important aspects with “On the Origen of the Species.”

Amazing. That’s all I can say. Amazing. Well, the sonatas are as well.

 

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